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Excerpt from The Iliad of Homer This confideration may farther ferve to anfwer for the conltant ufe of the fame epithets to his gods and he roes, fuch as the far dxarting Phoebusithe blue-eyed Pal las, the fwift-footed Achilles, (so; which fome have cen fured as impertinent and tedioufly repeated. T hofe of the gods depended upon the powers and offices then be lieved to belong to them, and had contra ted a weight and veneration from the rites and folemn devotions in which they are ufed they were a fort of attnbutes with which it was a matter of religion to falute them on all b'ccaliohs, and which it was an irreverence to omit. As for the epithets of great men, .nionf. Boileau is of Opi nion, that they were in the nature of firnames, and te peated as'fuch; for the Greeks having no names derived from/their fathers, were obliged to add fome other dillinc tion of each perf on either naming his parents exprefly, or his place of birth, profeflion, or the like: as Alexan der the fon of Philip, Herodotus of Halicarnaffus, Dioge hes the Cynicivc. Homer, therefore, complying with the cullom of his couhtry, ufed fuch dillin iive additions as better agreed with poetry. And indeed we have fome thing parallel to thefe in modern times, f uch as the names of Harold Hare-foot, Edm'und Ironlide, Edward Long lhanks, Edward the black Prince e. If yet this be thought to account better for the propriety than for the repetition, .i {hall addafarther conjecture. Hefiod, divid ing the world into its different ages, has placed a fourth age between the brazen and the iron one, of heroes di flint? From other men, a divine race, twee/fought ate e; and Troy, are called demi-gaa'r, and the care of jupiter in tbe {flandr of t/7e blefid'r. Now among the divine honours which were paid them, they might have this alfo in common with the gods, not to be mentioned without the folemnity of an epithet, and fuch as might be itc'cep table to them by its celebrating their farnihes, actions or qualities. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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